CDC Director: Ebola in Africa now an ‘epidemic,’ ‘completely out of control’

posted at 8:41 am on September 2, 2014 by Noah Rothman

Centers for Disease Control Director Tom Friedman did not return from his visit to West Africa, where the worst outbreak of Ebola in history has spread to five countries and killed at least 1,500 people, with any good news.

Friedman told CNN hosts on Tuesday that the Ebola outbreak in Africa is currently “completely out of control” and is now an “epidemic.” The CDC director added that “it will get worse in the future and our window of opportunity to turn it around is closing.”

This outbreak has resulted in accelerated research and testing of an experimental Ebola vaccine. Experimenting with a workable vaccine will begin this week at the National Institutes of Health. “According to the NIH, the vaccine will also be tested on healthy volunteers in the United Kingdom, Gambia and Mali, once details are finalized with health officials in those countries,” CNN reported.

But while the West seems largely convinced that superior medical technology and detection methods will prevent the disease from spreading to the United States, two experts on viral outbreaks are not so sure.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal opinion pages, former Food and Drug Administration Deputy Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and former Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Tevi Troy do not expect the U.S. to escape the consequences of globalization that easily. “Given international travel, we will certainly see cases diagnosed here, and perhaps even experience some isolated clusters of disease,” they write, though noting that a West Africa-style outbreak is highly unlikely in the industrialized world.

They advocated for a major campaign to contain the virus in Africa and to aid those suffering as a result of this historic outbreak. The two experts add that the virus is already mutating fast and will be even more difficult to treat as it continues to evolve.

Could Ebola mutate and become airborne? It would be highly unlikely for a virus to transform in a way that changes its mode of infection. Yet this disease produces a massive level of the Ebola virus in the blood, called viral load, which can lead to excessive mutations. An Aug. 28 article in the journal Science shows that Ebola is already mutating during the current outbreak, in ways that could make it harder to diagnose. So the longer the virus spreads unchecked, the greater the chance of other random mutations that could also make it harder to contain, or to target with a new drug.

The World Health Organization warned last week that, “The Ebola outbreak will affect more than 20,000 people in West Africa and might spread to more countries, indicating a clinical emergency all over the world.”

“It requires worldwide effort costing more than half a billion dollars to overcome the deadly Ebola outbreak,” the group added.

dogsoldier, I think much of the problem comes from CDC’s insistence on parsing “airborne” to mean aerosol dry particle infection as opposed to droplet infection from sneezes, etc in the immediate 3 foot zone around a sick person.

They consider droplet infection a low probability because few of the previously studied cases had viral particles in saliva. They also actively try to hide that fact to avoid panic, unfortunately. But this outbreak’s patients get bleeding / mucous membranes and blood mixed with sputum in a sneeze will certainly be infective in that close zone. It only takes 1 – 15 viral particles to infect.

Add to that insects (like houseflies) landing on the dead bodies and effluvia and then on your lip or food, the possibilities for infection are endless.

Unfortunately, that is NOT going to happen in Liberia. Take a weak public health infrastructure made weaker by 90% of the doctors fleeing the country, most of the remaining doctors getting infected and 55% of those dying, poverty, a rebellious population, ineffective government, a recent nurses strike over the lack of equipment since they don’t want to continue dying in droves, an exponentially increasing number of infections and you have the classic out of control disease outbreak.

If the HAVES wish to keep the infected scattering across the globe as they flee the disease and inevitably arriving on their shores, they must come to the aid of this collapsing country. They only have a few weeks before the out of control becomes impossible to control by humans. The disease will then have control and kill millions.

Just multiply the recent introduction of Ebola into Senegal times XXX (it could be any number) to get an idea of the possibilities. A student or 2 decided their chances of a cure were better in Senegal and drove across the Guinea border with their teacher. A few days later in the hospital, it was diagnosed as Ebola. Now the contact tracing & isolation of those exposed begins & I sure hope it works well.

I posted links from which you can find all the original data for the present outbreak.

Well, then, why don’t you go and find out the sources for my facts ? Because you are retarded.

– So, you admit that Ebola spread to Senegal when you claimed it hadn’t ? retarded

– you minimize the continued increase in cases in Nigeria after the Health minister erroneously claimed the outbreak was contained ? retarded

– you merely repeated me when I said the outbreak was out of control > retarded

– you seem to think I mentioned the genetics of Ebola in my original post ? retarded

– you posted links that I have already read ? retarded

Admit it, you are just too retarded to read all the links I could post and clearly are retarded to think that just because I don’t waste my time posting links for the retarded means they are not facts ? retarded

Can we get a moderator cleanup in this thread? the amount of vitriol and personal attacks is at a very high level. It makes it hard to read when people are constantly fighting and insinuating that their opponents suffer from Downs Syndrome.

On another note: I just really hope that the people who are dead, stay that way. Ebola is bad enough. Leaking and bleeding zombies would make it just so much worse.